by The Fikiria Desk | May 22, 2021 | Consumers
For more than two decades, one of Africa’s largest populations has bought its airtime from a single seller. Ethiopia’s more than 100 million people have had no rival network to Ethio Telecom, no competing tariff to weigh, no second brand to reach for when...
by The Fikiria Desk | Mar 8, 2021 | Consumers
A new network usually arrives with a ribbon and a speed claim. The more interesting story for anyone building a business is what a faster pipe lets other people build on top of it. When Zain switched on commercial 4G in South Sudan on 8 March 2021, the founder’s...
by The Fikiria Desk | Mar 8, 2021 | Consumers
For most people in South Sudan, the mobile phone has been a voice-and-text device in a market where a data connection was slow, expensive or simply out of reach. The commercial launch of 4G by Zain on 8 March 2021 sets out to change that. The question worth asking on...
by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Consumers
A market can be huge and still be hard to invest in. Somalia’s mobile-money economy has carried a large share of everyday value for years, yet the absence of a formal rulebook kept serious capital at arm’s length. On 27 February 2021, the Central Bank of...
by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Consumers
Somalis have moved money by phone for years while the channel that carried it sat largely outside formal supervision. That gap narrowed on 27 February 2021, when the Central Bank of Somalia issued the country’s first mobile-money licence, folding an everyday...